Blogger to WordPress

Kitty Makes It is nearing its first birthday!

When I first launched the site, I wanted a blog to keep my projects organized so I could remember which patterns I like and share with others who might be asking about things I’ve made.

I actually already owned a domain for my personal email. When I got married, my name went from extremely uncommon to basically like Jessica Jones. I had zero luck funding anything that resembled my name on any of the major email providers. I was job hunting right around the time we got married too and I was worried that if I had a bunch of numbers in my address, I could miss out on an important email, like an interview invite. I’ve gotten lots of those sort of things for someone named Leann with my maiden name so it’s a real concern.

I didn’t want my personal domain and email linked to my very public projects blog. I mean, I know someone could find it if they wanted to. I use my real name on Facebook! But since I am frequently talking about my bust and hip measurements… that’s not something I need the mean girls at work having easy access to.

My husband calls me Kitty. Partially because we have a lot of cats and I do tend to act like them (hungry and cold all the time, love naps, fickle) but also partially because Red and Kitty Foreman from That 70’s Show seem to be our marriage spirit animal. So Kitty Makes It. I’m Kitty and I make it.

I wanted my own domain so it would be easy to remember and type out. I bought www.kittymakesit.com on a whim and it wasn’t until after I bought it through Google Domains that I found how easy it was to set up a page. Here’s the search screen to search for a domain on google.

Once purchased, the domain appears in my “manage domains” window. I click the website button and bam, it takes me to a page where I can start a website in a few minutes.

It offers lots of different types of websites.

I went through the options and saw that if you choose Blog you get sent to Blogger which is free and if you choose WordPress, it sends you through BlueHost for $10/mo. (By the way, so not true. Read to the end, turns out it’s not as much as google thinks it is)

I went with Blogger. It seemed intuitive and there’s no risk because it’s free.

Blogger has its Pros

I got started with blogger and it was exactly what I needed. I could use it like a diary and that’s all the organization I needed.

As my blog began to grow, I messed around with menus and widgets and I was pretty happy with Blogger. I was able to set up a template that I really liked. It was helpful and clean and mobile friendly.

I even had separate pages set up, linked across the top. I loved how the popular post thumbnails displayed on the side too. I was really proud of my site.

I started making myself goals for sewing/blogging to get better and expand. Just for fun, I still work and commute a billion hours a week so it’s just personal improvement. I made myself a goal of picking a style of dress I love and trying all the different patterns in that style to compare.

I got 2500 hits on one post. I never expected that kind of visibility! PS Thank you for being here, that’s so cool!

As my blog developed, I started realizing that the posts don’t seem to connect to each other like I would like. Once you’re here (Kitty Makes It), do you just read the post you came to? Hopefully you see the thumb nails for other posts, but are those relevant to you?

I started to struggle with keeping organized as my content grew. For example, I may want to compare two different company’s version of a similar item, or show you other items by the same company. I found myself going back and editing old posts to add new information and completely messing up the formatting.

I was also copy pasting in a lot of content. For example, I tried making an Ellie and Mac collage to put on each of my Ellie and Mac posts. Blogger can’t do photos in a grid (unless you write the HTML), so my manual attempts to line them up looked haphazard even after I spent a lot of time with it.

This drove me nuts! I had always done photos across the whole screen before, I never had the content for related posts. Now that I do, I couldn’t find a way to show it off.

I kept thinking about switching, but I really thought BlueHost to back WordPress was $10 a month and I just couldn’t justify that since this is a personal blog.

I did a guest blog spot on Mamma Can Do It (Pleated Peplum Hack) and she uses WordPress. I got a taste for what it could do and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Making the Decision

I kept telling my husband that I wanted to cut over. We talked about it, I was hoping he would tell me to just go for it and it’s worth the $10. He never said that. I kept dragging my feet thinking about all the broken links, what if there’s down time? What if I can’t get it back up? What if I lose all the content I have?

I put it on my 2019 New Year’s Resolutions list that I haven’t yet written down.

Then I had a lifestyle change that I will be able to announce here soon and realized I’m going to be blogging more and more. I’ve actually been debating getting another blog for my non-sewing related thoughts too.

I looked into BlueHost and right there on the homepage, it said $4 a month! Uhm, what? Google said $10! I tried a bunch of different ways. When you click the website button in google and go through there, even if you tell it you already have a BlueHost account, it tries to sell it to you for $10. But $4 I can justify (that’s literally one coffee I need to skip)!

So I took a risk and I went to BlueHost directly. I ended up getting a STEAL of a deal. I don’t know if it’s because it’s Christmas or what, but I got a higher level of service for under $5 a month. I locked it in for three years.

It came with unlimited domain hosting. So who knows, you might see me food blogging, fashion blogging, cat-parent blogging. I do love my instant pot and air fryer. We’re saving for a wok. So the kitchen fails are endless! Hoping to get Amazon Fresh here soon too so I can do more cooking.

For $12 a year I can buy another domain and host them all through this same plan. The plan I have is called “Prime”. I figured that’s fitting for me since I have such a Prime addiction already. So I’ve been buying up domains trying to figure out what’s next for me. Kindof having a “the possibilities are endless” moment.

Nuts and Bolts of the Switch

• I went to BlueHost, I bought a plan.
• I kept my blogger account totally untouched.
• I downloaded all my blogger content by going to “backup” and downloading it all.
• I uploaded all the content into WordPress on the temporary site it gave me
• I spent a weekend tweaking my new site.
• I spent more time obsessing over the site.
• I uploaded redirects to ensure no broken links.
• I obsessed more.
• I finally cut over.
• I had broken links galore, the site was down for an hour and I drank a bottle of wine.
• I fixed it all. I was amazing. I feel like some kind of a hacker/genius even though what I did was super simple.
• I have a new website that is super easy to add content to!
• I can’t wait to find more creative web outlets.

Note: All of this is because I have my own domain. If you don’t it would probably still involve a download from blogger and upload to wordpress, but then you wouldn’t have a cut over. They’d both be running and you’d just manually redirect. Obviously this is also based on using google domains. I haven’t the slightest idea how to use another domain manager, but I imagine the concept is the same.

Backing up from Blogger

Import to WordPress

Most of my content came over. I just ended up having to go in and do featured images for some of the older posts. No big deal.

Categories and Tags versus Labels

I also cleaned up categories versus tags. In Blogger you only have labels but in WordPress you can have two layers, categories and tags. This is part of the organization I was lacking on blogger and something that I really wanted to redo in WordPress, not an error of conversion.

In WordPress, I am able to choose which categories appear on a menu and sort by Designer versus Type. I have separate tags down at the bottom.

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Recognizing that I am a redirect freak

I cannot stand broken links. I don’t know why it bothers me so much, but I was obsessive. I went through my action history in facebook back five months and checked every link I posted to make sure it worked.

During the transition, I went from a www.kittymakesit/month/year/page.html formal to a kittymakesit.com/page format (no wwww and no .html and no date/month). I read a lot of articles advocating that you could choose the permalink setting in WordPress that matches Blogger’s method but then you’re stuck with that forever. I didn’t like the blogger naming convention, so I opted to change all my old links and move forward with a new method.

I downloaded a redirect plug in. I created a spreadsheet of all my old links and their new addresses. Then I uploaded the spreadsheet.

There were a few I had to go in and trouble shoot manually, but for the most part, they all worked right off the bat. The spreadsheet upload was amazingly quick. Typing all my links into the spreadsheet, not so much. It’s one reason I would advocate making the switch before you have an overwhelming amount of content.

The real cut over

When it was really time to go live, I was so nervous. But it was actually easy. So Google still thinks I have a blogger site if I click the website button in Google Domains.

But you actually want the DNS Settings button

Meanwhile, go into BlueHost and under Domains, choose “Assign”. It will tell you what to change your name servers to.

Back in Google Domains, DNS settings, change your name servers (there’s two)

It’s live. Anything you published to your temp site in BlueHost is now showing on the real internet.

Note: I opted not to transfer my domain, just to assign it. It’s just easier for me to keep it in google domains since I have a bunch, but BlueHost does offer you to transfer it in for free and they’ll handle your auto renewals too. Then you’d have everything in one place and no concern over name servers.

At this point I had to go do all my redirects again because I realized I left the www in the new links. I also ended up having to change my theme and redo all my widgets because I had not chosen a responsive theme (adapts to screen size) and the one I had looked really bad on a mobile phone screen. But it all was pretty easy. My site was down for an hour according to my JetPack plugin that monitors that, but I think that was just the time it took for the Cache to clear when I changed the name servers.

Honestly, using words like cache and name servers makes this sound hard. It’s totally not. I’m a history major who blogs about sewing and is fluent in lolcat. I don’t even know how to pay the phone bill online, I write a check and put it in the slot every month. You got this.

The Grass is Greener

The “blocks” style Gutenberg editing in WordPress is amazing. The formatting is so clean, moving blocks around makes a lot of intuitive sense. It’s a big part of the reason I switched.

The ability to do a photo collage is top notch. Finally! This is what I wanted.

Remember my crooked photos in blogger?

Here’s what I can do now:

and even better, I can save this as a reuseable block for all my Ellie and Mac posts. So handy!

The link builder is something I didn’t know about until I started using WordPress and it’s something I never realized I needed, but it’s great. When you’re setting up a link in the editor, you can just type the name of a post and it will populate the address for you. Since my whole purpose was to try to organize my content relative to each other, this is so super handy to have.

Blogger isn’t all bad

I do miss the Google Photos integration with Blogger. I switched to using Google Photos because I could upload once and then pull down from there to put into blogger. WordPress’s media library is a bit of a mess unless you pay extra for an organizer plugin. I’m hoping to play around and find a free plugin that might work. I’ve only been in WordPress for a weekend so far, I’m sure I have much to learn.

Blogger is free and backed by google hosting in your google account that is linked to blogger. Major pros. Even though it’s the same account where I use google drive to backup all my sewing patterns, I still have plenty of storage left. I think I have half of my allotted 16gb left after one year of blogging.

BlueHost storage is unlimited though (at least on the prime plan I got). Which is good because I just signed on for 3 years, so if I keep growing at the same rate, I’m going to need that. I didn’t buy my DSLR camera until July, so half of my storage is still with my old coolpix camera. Who knows, maybe I’ll even add video tutorials or something fun. I’ve always wanted to host a sewalong!

Link disclosure:  This post may contain affiliate links. Clicking the link doesn’t change the product or price you’re shown, but I might get a small percentage towards materials for my next project.  If you found this post helpful and are planning to purchase the pattern anyway, I’d really love for you to use my link.